Teaching Data Analytics in Higher Education: The Benefits and Pitfalls of Learning Analytics

Abstract

Modern organizations build their competitive advantage on digital technologies and possibilities provided by data. To succeed in this kind of modern work life, students need various digital skills, including contemporary data analytics skills. Especially there is lack of innovative learning environments and different kinds of hands-on experiences that would transform the teaching of statistics and data analytics towards more applied and critical approaches, favoring the humanistic thinking of students. Learning analytics data can be used to enhance the learning of the students and to produce automatic feedback and adaptive tasks to guide the students in the right direction. With the help of data, the teacher deepens the understanding of the learner's experience and develops teaching. In this paper, the challenges of teaching technical content, such as data analytics, in online course environment are studied. The special interest is to study how learning analytics can be used in teaching technical content for student for pedagogical development. The aim is to provide understanding both on the benefits and the pitfalls, and to develop potential solutions to overcome the challenges. The analysis of the usefulness of learning analytics is carried out from the teachers’ perspective. Learning analytics experiences from two online data analytics courses are gathered in the form of teacher interviews. In the end of the paper, guidelines for developing data sources for learning analytics for online environments are provided.



Author Information
Reijonen Atte, South-Eastern Finland University of Applied Sciences, Finland
Helander Nina, South-Eastern Finland University of Applied Sciences, Finland
Hurri Päivi, South-Eastern Finland University of Applied Sciences, Finland
Ansamäki Jarkko, South-Eastern Finland University of Applied Sciences, Finland

Paper Information
Conference: BCE2024
Stream: Learning Experiences

This paper is part of the BCE2024 Conference Proceedings (View)
Full Paper
View / Download the full paper in a new tab/window


To cite this article:
Atte R., Nina H., Päivi H., & Jarkko A. (2025) Teaching Data Analytics in Higher Education: The Benefits and Pitfalls of Learning Analytics ISSN: 2435-9467 – The Barcelona Conference on Education 2024: Official Conference Proceedings (pp. 1057-1065) https://doi.org/10.22492/issn.2435-9467.2024.88
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.22492/issn.2435-9467.2024.88


Comments & Feedback

Place a comment using your LinkedIn profile

Comments

Share on activity feed

Powered by WP LinkPress

Share this Research

Posted by James Alexander Gordon